


Collapse, as a Noun

by dimircharmer



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, biofic, the FARO plague, the clawback decade, the great die off
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-30 10:22:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12651678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer
Summary: Elizabet Sobeck is fifteen the day the last polar bear dies.-The collapse, rebirth, and collapse of a world, and the events in Elizabet's life that accompany them.





	1. The Great Die Off/University

The day the last polar bear died, Elizabet Sobeck is fifteen, and more concerned with salmon. The polar bears were inevitable; between shortening winters in the Arctic, and bioaccumulation of pesticides and Mercuries, they really didn’t stand a chance in the wild. The last one, Nannuk, had displayed signs of pesticide poisoning and had lived his entire life in the Ottawa Museum of Arctic Heritage. Apex predators were inevitable casualties of environmental degradation, and their eventual loss only worsened the effects on the rest of the ecosystem.

Elizabet remembers pictures her mother had shown her, of Yellowstone national park. Wolves had been hunted to extinction, and then re-introduced, half a century later. The reintroduction of the wolves had such a massive cascading effect on the ecosystem that rivers were cleaner, after their return. Elizabet had asked if they could go see it, and her mother told her that it had been sold to create a mining corporate holding and that wolves were extinct there once more, and the rivers once more muddy.

Elizabet tells herself, sternly, that she doesn’t care about the last polar bear. There was enough genetic material in storage that populations could be gestated and restored, someday, maybe. She turned her attention back to salmon stocks, back to the incredibly complex intersection of dams, pollution, and cities that blocked off their traditional spawning routes, and tried to find a solution that would, maybe, help keep the grizzly bears from ever having a ‘last’ grizzly bear. She could finish her undergraduate this year or next, and then be in charge of her own lab, while she did her masters and her doctorate. She could work on restoration efforts throughout the entire northwest coast, could try to keep that ecosystem healthy enough to sustain apex predators. Maybe, someday, she’d have a team with a capable enough embryologist on staff that she could start thinking about polar bears again.

 

-

 

 Elizabet is waiting for a meeting with her thesis supervisor when New Zealand officially ‘sinks’. It had been a long time coming- the meeting, not the sinking, although that too. Elizabet had been working in a lab with students eight and ten years her senior for nearly eight months, and with her on site, they had made progress that they couldn’t have imagined three years ago. She’s dedicated her team to the study of soil quality in what remains of the Amazon, and they finally have enough data to begin designing the ‘bots that might fix it. They’re going to need a combination of mini-biomes- something to replicate what remains of the healthy bacterial makeup, as well as a distribution system, in addition to a body that can withstand the one of the hottest, most humid environments on the planet. She’s flipping her thumb drive over in her hands, when her phone buzzes with the news alert, heralding New Zealand’s return to the sea- she looks at it just long enough to silence the phone so it won’t buzz in during her presentation.

She walks into the meeting, which was supposed to be with just the head of the department, and is confronted with four men in suits, sitting in the classroom behind doctor Fitz.

“Professor,” She greets.

“Liz!” Fitz says cheerfully, “So good to see you outside of your lab.”

Elizabet grins tightly, “You know me, sir. I’m not happy unless I’m busy.”

Fitz laughs and invites her to use the projection screen at the front of the tiny classroom, to show off her data. She had planned on plugging it into Fitz’s office holodisplay, in private. She’s not sure when these four professionals became part of the plan.

Still, she does their best to ignore them as she starts her progress report- the breakdowns of the chemicals in the soil, the source of each (mostly the pipeline spills that plagued the rainforest through the twenty-teens, entire once-healthy wetlands turned into petroleum bogs, smothering every frog bird and insect unlucky enough to land in its wake) and they levels of penetration, each inches deep into shockingly thin topsoil.

She watches one of them lean forwards as she starts discussing her potential solution- tens of thousands of autonomous machines, little drill bits essentially, each with its own tiny internal bacterial manufacture and power source. She watches everyone save professor Fitz grow stony-faced when she talks about where she wants to run her pilot, the money it would cost, the permissions she would need to solicit from corporate holdings.  One of them leaves when Elizabet recommends the immediate halt of the oil refinery in the area.

Fitz shakes his head at her when she’s done and tells her that more than likely, the funding for the project is going to evaporate within the next calendar year if she can’t find a way to get her worms to work around pipelines.

Elizabet had planned to go home, after the presentation, but instead, she gets on the bus back to the lab and reads the story of the last hundred New Zealanders, residents of the islands for thousands of years, who were evacuated that morning. She walks through the doors of the lab, throws a lab coat on over her single presentation blouse, and tries to find a way to re-write the worm’s pathing that won’t get them stuck beside the most obvious, horrific source of pollution in the rainforest, and (god forbid) damage a pipeline.

 

-

 

On Elizabet’s first day of her doctorate, she sits in a room listening to someone explain the layout of the campus, and she is ignoring them in favour of mulling on the flight patterns of one of her drones. They’re little skimmers, out over the Pacific garbage patch, from when she was doing research on ocean acidification, back when she was running grunt work for the head of her department in her first year of undergraduate, when she was thirteen and eager. She’s eighteen now, and wondering if they would be more efficient if she had designed them like hummingbirds, capable of stopping in place or hovering when rogue waves and unexpected pieces of flotsam surged up towards them.

She thinks (hopes) that designing the first independent, self- adjusting hovercraft will be enough for a doctorate in Philosophy in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Design, which the cheerful grad student at the front of the class is trying to encourage her to call PRAID. Elizabet can’t imagine a world in which she uses that acronym and doesn’t come across like an absolute asshole. She starts paying attention again, when they start to go over her responsibilities as a TA, about lab hours, about the partnerships that the institution has with dozens of others across the globe.

 

-

 

She starts to notice the observers in her thesis defence. She doesn’t mind at first- strangers in the back behind the panel of robotics doctors clearly recording her on their focuses. She does mind the ones who try to scan her laptop when she’s not looking in cafés. She can’t fucking stand the ones that _break into her fucking lab_ at odd hours of the night to try to _steal her goddamn research_.

Carnegie-Mellon has to move her to a more secure lab, and she’s honestly a hair’s breadth from filing a lawsuit before her career advisor gently warns her it would probably be bad for her job prospects. She compromises, and gives an interview with CNN instead, where she is as scathing as possible towards the research team of the robotics industry leader that stooped to stealing the research of a student not even out of school yet, and makes it clear that she’ll be filing charges next time. She loathes playing up her youth, especially since she’s already starting to find grey around her temples, but all’s fair in love and war and when someone tries to break into your _fucking lab._

They back off, after that, for the most part, though the suits in the back of her thesis defence grow more common -and more expensive- as she starts to outline the plans for solar-powered drones, of a global air pollution monitoring system, of the potential to turn carbon scrubbers into the material to enact repairs, the theory of self-sufficient airborne climate systems no longer a dream, but a not-too-distant future possibility. She has, after hundreds of hours of writing grant applications, and industry leaders across the world calling her work “promising,” enough money to build only her prototype and not even enough money to launch it.

 

-

 

Elizabet spends nearly the entirety of the day after she submits her doctoral thesis dead to the world in her mother’s guest bedroom, in her childhood home in Nevada. The day after that, she doesn’t put her focus on once, and revels in the feel of her open ear, the fact that it doesn’t get hot at all even in the scorching ranch sun, and that the sound coming from that direction isn’t the least muffled or tinny. She spends the next week with her mother, re-learning the feel of dirt under her nails, the way chickens flock to you when you enter their pen with feed, the sound of the wind whipping across the planes of the earth. Her graduation comes and goes, and Elizabet isn’t there.

The day of her graduation, she opens her focus to three hundred emails, and closes it again, and watches the sunset from the roof.

Two weeks after she finishes her doctorate, a helicopter sets down in the middle of the empty lot across from the Sobek family ranch. Elizabet goes out to greet them, in her flannel and her work boots and a shotgun.

“You’re a hard woman to find, doctor.”

The man who gets out of the helicopter is wearing a thousand-dollar suit jacket over a pair of blue jeans and boots.

“Ted Faro,” he introduces, “Of FARO Automated Solutions.”

Elizabet frowns. “You made the focus, right? And the personal servitors before that?”

He smiles, and it’s disarmingly self-deprecating.

“Yeah,” he says, “that’s me.”

“The nanny mode in the AI is good work,” Elizabet says, “the teaching modules in particular. Clever to have it tap into report cards and observed play habits. Better, to have it adapt accordingly.”

He raises his eyebrows. “That’s supposed to be a black box, you know. Proprietary information. I could sue.”

Elizabet shrugged. “If you did, you couldn’t offer me a job, and I suspect you’re about to.”

Faro laughs, “Not much gets by you, I see. What have you had so far, eighty job offers? A hundred?”

“One twenty-five.”

“Ouch," Faro says, "I’ll triple whatever the best offer is. Although I suspect that’s not necessarily what’s going to pull you, here.”

Elizabet raises her eyebrows, “Triple my best offer is pretty enticing. What else you got?”

“Elizabet,” Faro says, “I want to save the world.”

Elizabet waits for him to laugh, or crack a smile, but it’s the most serious he’s looked the whole conversation.

“You think I can’t see what’s happening?” Faro continues, “We’ve got, what, twenty, twenty-five years before the world starts collapsing around us? It’s already starting, there are famines in China every other year, half the drinking water on the planet goes through more processing than most _plastics_ to render it potable. I can’t sit back and do nothing here, there’s a gap a mile wide in the tech industry for a team of smart, motivated people to make a difference.”

Faro looks furious, almost, but not at her. Frustrated, in the way that only the rich can get when there is something beyond even _their_ reach when they so rarely find a problem they cannot simply throw money at until it vanishes. Faro, apparently, sees the fate of the planet the same way his colleagues see attractive younger women.

“I want you on that team. You get a blank cheque, a staff of three junior scientists- your pick- your projects are self-directed; all I need are regular reports on your progress. I can get permissions from any country, any corporate holding for you to run tests, put machinery on their territory, collect soil samples- whatever you need. I own half the computers in the world, they’re crippled without me, I can convince them to let me do _anything_.”

Elizabet can feel her heart pounding in her throat, a _team_ , near unlimited freedom, a corporation that didn’t want to use her to clean up their own chemical spills, and only then when those spills would cause them to lose face-

“Well?” Faro says.

“Saint Valentine Ants.” The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them.

“What?”

“Crematogastar ants in Australia.” Elizabet says, heart pumping. “They build the colonies where the butterflies in the mangroves lay their eggs, and the butterflies pollinate the whole damn mangrove. But, pesticides wash into the waterways and kill the ants, which kill the butterflies, which means half the northwest coast is sloughing into the damn sea every year, and making the whole continent more vulnerable to hurricanes. But it’s spread across three separate borders and the ants bite, and eat house foundations, so there’s no money in them. You try to tell people they’re going extinct and they say, ‘good riddance’.”

Faro nods. “How much time would you need?”

“Maybe six months?” Elizabet guesses, “I have all the data, and the ants still live in urban areas, I’d just have to find a way to clean up the area to make it stable for them. In theory, they’d do most of the work themselves.”

“How do you feel about Casper?”

“The city?”

“Well I can hardly have the lead of one of my teams a state away, now can I?”

Elizabet shifts her shotgun to her off hand.

 “I suppose not.” She holds her hand out to shake. “You’ve got yourself a scientist.”

 Faro beams and seizes it in both of his.

“Elizabet,” he says, “We’re going to do incredible things together.”

In the late Utah light, excitement in her chest, eagerness burbling up her throat, she knows it to be truth, as sure as the sunset stains the rocks. The two of them together are going to change the world.

 

-

 

One of her team, handpicked by Elizabet herself, is an Entomologist straight from UFlorida. They do it in four and a half months, up and self-sustaining and only requiring monitoring in the event of disaster. Faro, (Ted, now) beams at her, at asks what her next project is going to be.

“Algae bloom in northern lakes,” Elizabet decides, almost on the spot.

“How much time?”

“Eighteen months.”

 

-


	2. The Clawback Decade/Ted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elizabet at FARO, and with Ted.

-

It is not long before other companies start to attempt to follow the path Faro is blazing. UnitedElectronics begins its creation of transit systems which filter air in any region they travel. Nanotech has been working on nanobots intended to repair the coral reef, and against all odds, they’re working, over the northern coast of Australia. Energy Unlimited created these tiny little spiders, to help keep shorelines in place while replanting and sea-wall construction efforts are in progress. Metallurgic is building trawlers out in the Pacific, dredging the ocean for garbage, compressing them back into functional materials. Silverene Inc has been working on an actual honest to god AI meant to monitor climate changes so they can all see if their changes are actually making a difference. It’s enough to make Elizabet fantasize, briefly, about leaving FARO to go work for them.

She would never leave, though. After her success in Australia, then Canada, and the other teams’ successes in the Colorado River, the Mississippi River Basin and three-mile island, FARO is the unquestioned leader, in what is becoming known as the Claw Back era.

Elizabet, at some point in that whirlwind first year of too much coffee and too many conferences and too little sleep, gets promoted to Chief Scientist. Her team is incredible, the work their doing is valuable, is unthinkable, and they share all of their information with each other, and Elizabet wakes up every morning eager to see what has been done while she slept, in other time zones around the world.

-

The next year, she wakes up to her cup of coffee as usual, and checks on the Green Robotic department’s ongoing projects. There’s a design from the team working on waterways meant to simulate root structures, to provide shelter for juvenile fish and prawn, while they bubble oxygen back into dead lakes. Another team has been trying to create some sort of machinery that will simulate the grazing effects of caribou for northern regions while the zoologists in Russia build the stock back up again before they release them in the tundra. She checks the reports of all the previous projects if there are any unexpected developments in the old projects run amock.

It is only then, after breakfast, while she’s on route to FARO headquarters, that she allows herself to check the inter-company board- an indulgence, more than a necessity. She’s anticipating carbon readings, from VASTSILVER, and a cheeky back and forth between the two companies working on river systems in the Congo, and the clipped, no-nonsense reports on chemical cleanup from the government team working on mercury cleanup out of Shenzen.

What she discovers, instead, is a crisis nearly six hours old already. At noon, local time, the Nanotech restorative swarm had begun devouring a fishing village in Kupang, Indonesia. It had, apparently, deduced that the main cause of ocean acidification was human activity, and had gone about ensuring that no human activity would again cloud the surface of the water.

Elizabet can hardly fault its logic.

By the next hour, it had begun crawling up fishing piers across the central islands, and video footage had begun to circulate of the grey goo that was so iconic of nanoswarms pouring gently, inexorably, down the main streets of Jakarta. She sent a priority alert to every member of her staff, and half the engineering staff at FARO working on unrelated projects and nearly ran through the doors at FARO.

Two of her team are there already, staring paralyzed at the projections on the news.

“Sanders!” Elizabet snaps, “With me!”

They leave Rigby, who specialized in soil detoxification, and had no programming experience, watching the Grey Goo ooze over the top of the desalination plant in Yogyakarta.

Nanotech had released the code for their bots -an autonomous swarm that learned by itself, how stupid could you _get-_ to the rest of the green robotics community as soon as it became clear they didn’t have the situation under control. Elizabet threw the code up on every workstation they had, briefly glanced at the “tried; failed,” section of the online report, and sent Sanders to try to find a backdoor, a zero-day exploit that a rogue programmer had left in, and Elizabet herself settled in to run analytics on their collective thinking, trying to predict which cities need to be evacuated.

The rest of the team arrives over the course of the next half hour, each rushing to their desks as the Goo swarms across the main islands. Ted, at some point in the morning, rushed down the stairs, tossed his suit jacket over a spare chair, and threw himself down in one of the workstations himself, pulling up the data even as he was reaching for a pair of headphones. It was easy to forget, with him running board meetings and annual reports, that Ted Faro had made his fortune because he was one of the United States' finest minds in robotics. The next eighteen hours proceed more or less in the same vein. The members of the team that don’t specialize in robotics continue to work on their various projects, and at some point, one of them orders food and coffee to be delivered to the team in the programming booths.

It’s less than thirty hours, total, from the inception of the bug in the system to the solution- the FARO team hadn’t even come close. It’s a team of whitehat contractors, up in Alaska, who eventually crack it, writing a complicated little line of malware that would convince the nanobots that the coral reefs _had_ been restored after all and that they could power down. That’s when Ted steps in and broadcasts it from FARO satellites, stopping the goo in its tracks, saving at least, the people who had fled to the mountains before it’s advent.”

“What happens now?” Ted asks, as the signal bounces through space, and back to earth.

“The goo hardens,” Elizabet says, “It was designed to stiffen when it was done- to provide anchoring points for new reefs to form. It’s durable as concrete and nearly as dense. It was designed specifically to be impervious to seawater.”

It’s also meters deep over most cities in the country. Elizabet feels like she’s going to throw up.

“Jesus,” Ted says. It’s well after two in the morning- his five o’clock shadow is thick as soot.

Elizabet turns back to her team. “Right,” she says, “Everybody go home and get a solid eight hours. I don’t want to see anyone before noon tomorrow. When we do, we’re going to go over every robotics project FARO has ever touched, and we’re going to run simulations of a similar disaster. We’re going to make sure all our backdoors work, we’re going to smash some new backdoors in if we need to, we’re going to make sure that if anything, _anything_ tries to co-opt our machines, if anything malfunctions, we’re not going to see anything like that. Clear?”

Her team tod at her, exhausted.

“Great,” Elizabet says, “Now get the hell out of here.”

Ted rests a hand on her shoulder, and she sinks into it.

“How far back will this set us back?” he asks.

Elizabet shrugs. “A week, if we’re lucky. A month, if we’re not. I’m going to try to isolate it to one team- we can’t have everybody stop.”

“I know,” he says.

They both know. The disaster in Indonesia is the cost of the Clawback decade, of the neglect of generations, and the full out, risky, desperate sprint they were now doing to catch up. There was never time for testing, to run full analysis on the initiatives they were pushing for, to even understand the consequences of their actions. And if they stop, if they slow, then the global collapse they have been pushing back will swallow them all. Indonesia was simply a sprinter stumbling at full tilt. All they can do is keep running.

“One month,” Ted re-asserts, “that’s all I can give you.”

He stretches then, arches his back hard enough Elizabet can hear three distinct pops.

“All-nighters used to be easier when I was in college,” he gripes, “I’m too old for this now.”

“You’re what, thirty-five?” Elizabet asks, “Hardly an old man, Ted.”

“Thirty-six, as of two hours ago,” he says mildly.

“Oh shit,” Elizabet says, “congratulations, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Ted says, “I was planning to take everybody out for drinks tonight, but that feels inappropriate now, you know, considering.”

“Yeah,” Elizabet says. “Next time we go out I’ll buy you a round.”

Ted rolls his eyes, “What, with the money I pay you? Might as well just knock seven dollars off your holiday bonus and do it myself.”

Elizabet laughs and collects her coat from where she had set it down on her desk nearly twenty hours ago.

“’Night, Ted.”

“Night, Liz.”

She leaves him, in the pink and blue glow of the hollow projectors, still showing the slow hardening of Indonesia’s casket, sealing everything in it under hundreds of billions of dollars of malfunctioning nanotech.

-

“Oh,” Elizabet says, softly, “Look. Poison dart frogs.”

There are half a dozen of them, bright and dangerous in their neon colours, chirping in a puddle in the forest. Ted squats next to her and looks at them himself.

“I always loved seeing these in those old nature vids when I was a kid,” he says, “Gotta admire something that warns you it’s dangerous.”

Elizabet smiles at them. “Yeah. Plus they’re faithful little communicators. Better than a canary in a coal mine, frogs are.”

“They’re not bad to look at, either,” Ted says and stands up. He offers Elizabet his hand to help her back up, and she takes it, sweaty palm on sweaty palm.

“Beautiful little things,” Elizabet agrees, “I can’t believe they’re back here already.”

They’re in the shadow of a former dam, one which was trapping all the runoff from a nearby mine to irrigate fields across the country, spreading the toxins in the refinery to fields and tables across the Amazonian river basin. Elizabet had started a soil and water purification project here seven years ago, and this is the first time she’s ever been to the Amazon in person. It’s hotter than she expected.

“Never been to a rainforest before, Liz?” Ted asks, as they start back on the trail

“Only the ones on the West Coast,” Elizabet admits, “I’ve never been to South America before.”

“Too busy?” Ted asks,

“Too expensive, when I was a kid, and I’ve pretty much been in school or working for you since I was fifteen. Never got the chance.”

“There’ll be time,” Ted says, “You’re making sure of that.”

“Just not now,” Elizabet says.

 “Just not now,” Ted agrees. They’re only in the rainforest for eighteen hours, two flights in the same day, checking on the work of Elizabet’s filtration systems, neither of them can be away from headquarters very long, even in the era of holocalls and communal coding.

“Well, we should get going if we’re going to make it to town then,” Elizabet says, “It’s not often I get to see the fruits of my labours, you know.”

-

The year that both ice caps freeze and stay solid, Elizabet and Ted get quietly, thoroughly, congratulatory drunk on a bottle of three-hundred-dollar scotch. Neither of them had taken so much as a day off in three years, and nights like this were rare, precious gemstones of evenings.

Ted had invited her up, allegedly, to celebrate the success of her nitrate scrubbers. Little whirlybirds that they had sunk into the coast of the Atlantic up and down the coasts of the continents, where Ted had _bought tracts of ocean_ to ensure their successful deployment. Over two-thirds had been sunk in dead zones, where nothing grew except calcium deposits and rust. When they had been pulled up, six months later, some of them had been growing _barnacles,_  in water that had been so acidic that it had corroded oysters out of existence only three years prior.

Ted said that the nitrate pulled from the filters might be enough to sell as fertilizer for another half-decade, enough time to stave off a famine in the corporate holdings and nations of Southeast Asia, enough time to find a sustainable alternative. Elizabet breathed life back into the oceanic equivalent of a fallout zone, and Ted had looked at her by-product and saved perhaps two and a half million lives.

“Elizabet,” he said, “It times like this I’m glad I snapped up your brain before someone who didn’t know what they were dealing with finding you.”

Elizabet laughed, young and drunk and _hopeful_. They feel, together, invincible. Together, her machines and his reach in tandem could actually fix this. She will regret these moments, later. Will regret that she couldn’t see that Ted Faro cared for nothing but the bottom line, will regret that she enjoyed his company, will regret that they had, once, been friends.

It’s hard not to like someone when you are twenty, and twenty-two, and twenty-six, when you are from a young, disparaged generation, one raised without hope, and the two of you are saving the world.

The sunsets up here, in the penthouse of Ted’s tower, had been red for decades, the smog that hung thick across the desert landscape turning the sun an appropriately apocalyptic hue. It might be her imagination, but Elizabet thinks that today, it seems as orange as it has been in her entire life.

 

-

 

Elizabet is barely paying attention when the first weaponized systems schematics load up on her focus. She’s trying to decide if she should simply accept that much of the old growth forest in the Hudson Bay Holding will simply remain plains forever, and she should dedicate her efforts to figuring out how to seed a healthy prairie across the area when the alert comes.

It seems almost innocuous- Ted asking if she’d be willing to consider switching her focus to defence manufacturing. She scowls at it, and swipes it out of the way, dictating her response to her focus, and thinking about all the extinct pollinators that would make her job easier.

She sends it back without a second thought, the subject line a firm ‘hell no’, and forgets about it, already thinking about how to synthesize a replacement for the honeybee.

-

“Ted,” she says, storming into his office while he’s in the middle of a holo conference, “what the _fuck?_ ”

“I’ll be right back,” Ted says to the stunned investors on the other end of the line and mutes them.

“Elizabet,” He says cheerfully, “You came just in time, they were boring me out of my _skull_ -“

“ _War machines_ , Ted.” Elizabet hisses, “What the _fuck_.”

“Well, the clawback decade is over, Liz,” He says, “We have to stay afloat somehow.”

“Stay afloat? Stay _afloat_? Your company is worth twenty-three _trillion_ dollars, Ted, you could spend every day from here till old age burning money, and you’d still make more on interest than most countries on earth will see in a decade.”

“The market isn’t there for Greentech anymore, Liz!” he says, “No one wants to buy it! We can’t keep _forcing_ them to buy it forever!”

“So you’re moving to weapons of _war?_ ”

“And why not?” Ted says, apparently baffled, “Someone has to, you know. I’m not going to let someone else muscle me out of the market. The world’s changing, and we need to change with it.”

“You’re going to take the best robotics team ever assembled and turn them to making weapons,” Elizabet says, horrified, mind whirring, “You’re going to change the way wars are fought. Forever. Fundamentally. You’re going to replace the soldier the same way we replaced the factory worker thirty years ago.”

“Yes!” Ted exclaims, “Imagine! No more casualties in war! No live soldiers, anywhere on the battlefield. You think that’s a _bad_ thing?”

“You don’t think there will be?” Elizabet says, “You don’t think there will be people who use their robots against civilian populations? You don’t think there’s going to be kids who throw bottles at war machines and get shot because the AI takes it as a hostile action? You think that this will all be fixed as long as they all have mandates to follow the Geneva conventions?”

“C’mon Liz,” Ted says, and lays a hand on her shoulder, an affectionate gesture, one they’ve shared a hundred times before, that Elizabet finds patronizing beyond belief in the moment.

 “I’m not worried about that. Not when I’ve got the greatest mind in robotics on my side.”

Elizabet feels bile rise in her throat.

“No,” she says, “You don’t.”

“What?”

“Good luck on your own, Ted.”


End file.
